Since each of these new Brewers pitchers throws a splitter, it is worth investigate the elements that create an effective splitter. First, one can question which aspects are the most important for a splitter: for instance, is success with a splitter evident in swings-and-misses, groundballs allowed, flyballs prevented, or some combination? These questions can be answered via the BaseballProspectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. For the following study, I first looked at starting pitchers that threw 200 or more splitters all-time, and I specifically considered Total Average against (TAv), swing percentage, whiffs per swing, groundballs and flyballs per Balls-In-Play (BIP), and pop-ups per BIP and fouls per swing.

First things first, here are the most effective splitter TAv for starting pitchers. I took the Top 11 (because Hisashi Iwakuma was #11, and I’ve previously looked at an Iwakuma / Guerra comp), and then added some other interesting pitchers (more on that below):

In order to judge the effectiveness of these pitchers’ splitters, I attempted to isolate contact results that could suggest lack of effective timing by batters (such as foul balls or pop ups), potentially effective BIP results (more groundballs than flyballs, ostensibly keeping the ball in the ballpark at a higher rate), and causing batters to fail to make contact. I also including swing percentage, since one might argue that a splitter is ineffective if the batter recognizes it as a ball outside the zone, or an off-speed / breaking pitch. This first step is to attempt to build an anecdotal body of evidence about the splitter.

Swings and whiffs:
In terms of drawing swings and drawing whiffs, several of the most effective starting pitchers (Top 10, or Top 20 percent) in terms of splitter TAv also drew high swing percentages and/or high whiff percentages. Junior Guerra, for instance, is successful with the splitter almost solely due to his ability to draw whiffs.

This should not necessarily be a controversial suggestion about the splitter. First, the splitter needs to draw swings in order to fool the batter; it’s not necessarily a set-up pitch like a fastball, or even a cutter or tight breaking pitch (or a get-me-over curve, for that matter). Furthermore, if a pitcher is drawing a high percentage of whiffs on a pitch, that limits the chances that a batter has to induce damage. Below, one will see that Guerra is absent the groundball, flyball, popup, and foul ball leaderboards; in fact, his batted ball and contact numbers on the splitter are positively pedestrian. But, since Guerra draws a whiff nearly 41 percent of swings on his splitter, he maintains strong odds of success with the pitch.

Groundballs and flyballs:
Notably, the most effective splitter pitchers are absent the top of the groundball and flyball splitter lists. Below, I’ve provided the top 25 (nearly Top 50 percent) of groundball and flyball splitter pitchers, presenting the best TAv pitchers in bold. I’ve added extremely interesting pitchers in italics, specifically those who managed to pitch in the Top 10 of groundball and flyball results without landing in the Top 10 splitter TAv. This means that these pitchers yielded arguably preferable groundball / flyball performances without producing elite TAv against on their splitter.

The implication here is that the splitter is not a “weak contact” pitch. A pitcher may not necessarily look to the splitter to induce a groundball, or prevent a flyball. This hypothesis is drawn from the fact that the very best splitter TAv pitchers do not necessarily exhibit these desirable batted ball traits, meaning that their splitters are not necessarily effective because of their groundball / flyball ratios. Tsuyoshi Wada, Alex Cobb, Nathan Eovaldi, and Taijuan Walker are the outliers worth studying here.

Pop Ups and Fouls:
Like groundballs and flyballs, so too with pop ups and foul balls: once again, it does not appear that a great splitter is great because of its ability to induce weak contact.

I toyed with combining whiffs per swing with foul balls per swing, in order to create a quick-and-dirty hybrid stat that accumulates the trickiest splitters: the ones that cause batters to swing and miss, or make mistimed contact a solid percentage of the time. But Guerra is once again instructive here, as he would perform very well in this statistic because of his high strike out rate. In this case, a “Power/Speed Number” method employing the harmonic mean could find the most balanced and effective timing-limiting splitters (using a formula such as [(2*FoulSwing*WhiffSwing) / (FoulSwing + WhiffSwing)]).

Judging the new Brewers righty splitter tossers, then, one might hypothesize that focusing on the ability to induce swings and whiffs is indeed much more important than focusing on splitter-induced grounders, flyballs, fouls, and pop-ups. This may seem like an obvious conclusion, but it is worth investigating the PITCHf/x results in order to verify the assumption. In this sense one might also be able to form accurate expectations for this gang of Brewers acquisitions.

Stuff Quality
The benefit of having PITCHf/x data available is that one can compare how splitters move compared to the other major pitches in a pitcher’s arsenal. This is another qualitative investigation of a pitcher’s splitter production, as one could conceivably compare horizontal and vertical movement variations, as well as spin rate and velocity differentials, in order to determine why the best splitter TAvs are indeed the best.

With this stated, here is the list of the notable right-handed starting pitchers analyzed above. I drew information from Brooks Baseball, isolating a pitcher’s primary fastball or sinker and main breaking pitch against the splitter. This essentially builds a basic game whereby one can understand how the splitter is used:

• Is it a “true change of speed” (slower than the breaking pitch AND fastball) or is it a “stepping stone” between the fastball and breaking ball?

• Does it primarily move armside or gloveside compared to both the fastball and breaking pitch?

• Does it primarily “rise” or “drop” compared to the fastball and breaking pitch?

• Perhaps most importantly, what are the other pitches that a successful splitter ball pitcher throws? One should not rule out that a pitcher’s other offerings make a splitter great, or amplify the effects of a splitter, and one should not assume that a pitcher’s splitter produces great results only because it is a great splitter on its own. (This may seem obvious, but it is worth arguing that a pitcher’s arsenal is a comprehensive whole, and not simply a sum of parts).

What does this mean? A few observations:

• The splitter is almost universally paired with the slider. This is fascinating in and of itself — baseball has a tradition of “we stick together” arsenals, meaning that pitchers work with what is tried and true. For as rare as splitter pitchers are in the MLB, it is surprising that so many of the best splitter pitchers have comparable breaking pitch offerings.

• Only six of the best splitter pitchers use the offering to break further armside against their fastball, meaning that the pitch would break further inside against a right-handed batter. Six of the best splitter pitchers (including Guerra) feature a split that breaks more than 1.5″ gloveside against the fastball, or “away” from a right-handed batter.

• Everyone except for Masahiro Tanaka throws a splitter that breaks further armside (“in” on RHB) compared to their breaking ball. The vast majority of great splitters also “rise” compared to a breaking ball; obviously since pitches don’t actually “rise,” one might more effectively say that this is an optical / perceptual tool that allows a pitcher to play the breaking ball against the splitter, since they “drop” in different manners (the breaking ball much more, the splitter much less).

• Some pitchers have “equidistant” horizontal and vertical ranges between their fastballs and breaking balls, when compared with their splitter. For example, take Guerra, who uses a split that “drops” 5.67″ from his fastball, but “rises” 5.27″ from his slider. Similarly, his split breaks to the gloveside by 1.93″ against the fastball, but moves armside by 2.26″ against the slider. So, one can see that Guerra aids his 94 / 86 / 83 fastball / split / slider stepping stone with vertical and horizontal planes that differentiate the pitches in a harmonic manner. Jose Contreras, Yu Darvish, and Kevin Gausman exhibit some similar harmonies, although not necessarily to the extent of Guerra.

• What surprised me the most is that the pitchers are evenly divided in how they use the splitter in their velocity range; approximately half of the arsenals use the splitter as a bridge between the breaking ball and fastball, leaving the others to use the splitter as a true change of speed. Some of these pitches move into semantics, as pitchers like Jose Contreras probably threw a “forkball,” Tim Lincecum probably uses a “vulcan change up” variation, and Mat Latos throws an unclassifiable oddity.

• Interestingly enough, having a top TAv against on a splitter does not always require a blazing hot fastball. In fact, some of the most effective splitter pitchers paired that offering with another moving fastball option, such as Roy Halladay’s gang of darting sinker-cutters, Dan Haren’s cutter, and a handful of other effective sinker pitchers (including “old” splitter pitchers like Ryan Dempster or Hisashi Iwakuma).

There is not a clear arsenal for success for projecting an unknown splitter pitcher into stardom, although one can suggest that using the pitch to elicit whiffs is much more important than any other outcome. The next question will be, “how do the new Brewers fit into these hypotheses?”

But now, as we flip the calendar over to 2016, the landscape is shifting. Adam Lind is gone, as are Francisco Rodriguez and (for an inexplicably heavy return) Jason Rogers. With Lind and Rodriguez’s salaries off the books, the Brewers’ player payroll for 2016 currently sits just north of $40 million, third-lowest in the league.

Meanwhile, dozens of players are still seeking an employer for the 2016 season — and the artificial boundary line of January 1st is going to widen the parameters of their search. The smart ones are regrouping, realizing that a full month has passed with nobody meeting their demands, perhaps retooling said demands. Less money will work; after all, it’s better than no money. Because of that, fewer years are A-OK, too; nobody wants to be locked into a contract paying below their perceived value for a long time. And if the right offer comes from a cold-weather team with high income taxes and no hope of playoff baseball, eh. We’re coming up fast on “beggars can’t be choosers” time — which is where the Brewers’ new front office can shine.

Already, the team has been linked with a free-agent starter who is very familiar with the Central Division in the National League.

Brewers Reportedly Interested in RHP Mat Latos https://t.co/t8ilylSfqI pic.twitter.com/YPNl2V4EqW

— Brew Crew Ball (@BrewCrewBall) December 23, 2015

Just two years ago, imagining Mat Latos as a reclamation project was downright absurd. Latos had proven to be one of the most consistently excellent pitchers in all of baseball. His resume at 26 years old was sterling: four consecutive seasons with three or more WAR, a WHIP below 1.25, and at least eight strikeouts per nine innings. In the middle of that stretch, a trade sent him from San Diego and Petco Park — one of baseball’s most pitcher-friendly stadiums — to the unforgiving Great American Ballpark of Cincinatti. Unfazed, Latos continued pitching at a high level and quickly established himself as “the nominal ace of the Reds’ pitching staff,” as his Player Comment identified in the 2014 BP Annual.

The 2014 season was less than kind to Latos, however. He missed time due to injury at several points and even when he was on the mound, his strikeout numbers took a dive as his fastball slowed by two miles per hour. His ERA and WHIP still looked great, but there were signs of trouble if you looked under the surface. Those signs were convincing enough for the Reds that they traded him to Miami last offseason in exchange for Anthony DeSclafani and Chad Wallach.

In 2015, those subsurface troubles turned into a veritable hurricane. Still throwing slowly, Latos was up and down in his starts with the Miami Marlins. Then, after being acquired by the Dodgers, he was just down. In five starts and one relief appearance, Latos posted an ERA of 6.66. Less than two months after trading for him, the Dodgers released Latos … during the last week of September.

Because of this, the right-hander has approached free agency with a strategy all his own. Rather than accepting a lower pay rate well into his 30s, Latos is seeking out a one-year contract. This way, he can build up his value with an effective campaign and still get well-paid before his 30th birthday.

For the Brewers, it’s a perfect fit. While Milwaukee surely wasn’t expecting to make a free-agency splash, the short-term nature of Latos’ desired arrangement fits with the team’s plans. The Brewers’ current payroll is less than half the 2015 mark, and while that isn’t money that has to be spent, it means that Mark Attanasio has the budgetary wiggle room to take a one-year flier on a talented pitcher.

The big question: What might that year look like? With Mat Latos, your guess is as good as mine. Despite his onetime reputation as a consistent force on the mound, Latos’ personality is anything but consistent. Some players control their emotions, others are controlled by them. Latos is controlled by them. Because of this, the range of possibilities is vast and all-encompassing. I took a look at a few of them.

The Good Scenario

Latos’ velocity leakage in 2014 was caused by a cocktail of injuries, and his 2015 performance makes it appear likely that this is the new normal. But Latos is just 28 years old. A rebound of sorts isn’t completely out of the cards. And to venture even deeper into the realm of speculation, Latos is an emotional player and a relentless competitor. Maybe he saw himself as a Cincinnati Red, and the trades to Miami and then Los Angeles wrecked his psyche. Maybe he was throwing slow because he was in his own head — and since he’s down to a one-year deal, he’s got to get past that to save his career.

The Brewers sign Latos, and he shows up to Spring Training on a mission. Surrounded by youth, promise, positivity, and no pressure to win, Latos works his fastball’s velocity back up to 93 mph — shy of what it used to be, but capable of overpowering hitters once again. With such a young, inexperienced group of players around him, the grizzled veteran immediately becomes one of the de facto team leaders. Nobody is surprised when he gets the ball on Opening Day, but they are when he tosses a three-hit shutout.

Back in the familiar National League Central, Latos reminds the league why he was once considered an ace. Miller Park is a notorious hitters’ park, but so was the GABP and Latos was at home there. He’s not an extreme flyball pitcher, and with his velocity back up to normal, he’s got the power to keep hitters on the defensive. It’s an up-and-down 2016 season for the Brewers, but Latos is one of the bright spots.

He only makes 15-20 starts for the team, but it’s enough to intrigue the trade market, since he looks like a difference-maker again. Come July, the Brewers are able to trade him to a contending team for a teenager who looks poised to be a top-10 prospect in a few seasons.

The Bad Scenario

Latos’ velocity leakage in 2014 was caused by a cocktail of injuries, and he was still hurt in 2015. Like, hurt hurt. Like, “that platelet-rich plasma injection you got after the 2014 season in your elbow was the writing on the wall” hurt.

These days, the Tommy John Monster has no mercy. He takes them all — old, young, cautious, reckless. But before he takes them, he takes their fastball’s power. The past two years, everyone knew something was off. However, when Latos is struggling to top 90 on the radar gun in Spring Training, everybody is legitimately worried.

Still, the veteran starter bravely soldiers on. He starts on Opening Day, largely by default, and follows up Kyle Lohse by getting shelled just like 2014. All of Latos’ starts are short, painful affairs. While the team wasn’t supposed to compete, Latos’ performance is actively stunting the development of other pitchers. It’s not even May and the Brewers are sidelining Latos, sending him off for a specialist and an MRI. The MRI comes back, and Latos has the dreaded torn UCL. For the record books, his ERA as a Brewer is worse than it was as a Marlin.

The Ugly Scenario

The Brewers sign Latos, but neglect to trade or release Matt Garza.

Spring Training rolls around. Latos and Garza are both emotionally volatile, and both trying to work their respective ways back from nightmarishly bad 2015’s. As the logic goes: you can get away with one head case on your team, just don’t give him somebody else crazy with whom to hang out. Latos needs a positive environment to get his career back on track. With Garza griping just an arm’s length away, that positive environment wouldn’t exist in Spring or beyond.

Latos starts for the team on Opening Day, and the umpires are unforgiving with their strike zone. He can’t catch a break, and with each call the frustration shows more and more on his face. Finally, he cracks, and blows up at the umpire, earning himself an ejection. The next day, Garza struggles with his command, mumbling and chirping the entire time.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion. And especially with players like Latos and Garza, when things go bad they keep going until they hit rock bottom. The 2016 Brewers’ starting rotation starts to look eerily like the 2015 iteration, with Latos playing the role of Kyle Lohse. The days he threw mid-90s are firmly behind him, and even his one-year contract looks like the biggest payday Latos can ever hope for.

Fed up with giving 40 percent of the team’s starts to expensive older pitchers who aren’t delivering results, David Stearns blows the whole thing up in July. Both players are shopped around aggressively and, ultimately, released.

Conclusion

The truth is, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Mat Latos in this phase of his career. But the promise of a 28-year-old pitcher on a one-year contract is too good a chance for a team in Milwaukee’s position to pass up. Hell, if things go well, maybe we trade Latos for a prospect — then bring him back, K-Rod style.

The risks associated with Latos are very real, especially the velocity drop. Two seasons in, you’d be crazy not to be skeptical that things are permanently slowed down. But older pitchers have recovered from more dramatic changes in velocity and become effective again. Latos has shown that he owns the skill of a 3-to-4 win pitcher. It’s worth the gamble for the Brewers to see if he can recreate that.